Drawing on a small qualitative study of mothers in the UK, this article argues that although concerted cultivation and intensive parenting are legitimated as 'good' parenting, these discourses have uneven effects on middle-class mothers' moral identities. My contention is that by focusing too much on processes of capital accumulation and transmission, studies of parenting risk simplifying the contradictory effects of these discourses on middle-class parents' subjectivities. I argue that accounting for how power is enacted on as well as by middle-class mothers provides some resources for an account of contemporary parenting that better reflects the complexity and diversity of middle-class mothers' experiences, including their ambivalence about concerted cultivation and their fears about the excesses of the middle-class emphasis on education.

Drawing on a small qualitative study of younger and older mothers, this article argues that the timing of motherhood is significant for the construction of classed maternal moralities. It is based on qualitative data generated during a year of fieldwork, with a group of mothers who had their first child when particularly younger or older than average. My discussion of mothers' accounts highlights the multitude of different 'right' times mothers evoked and their struggles to reconcile them. In particular I identify there were two normative and conflicting discourses about the 'right' time for motherhood the narrative of appropriately timed motherhood and the discourse of generational right time. This article highlights the classed dimensions of normative discourses about the timing of motherhood and draws attention to the lifecourse dis-synchronicities which these two groups of women faced around becoming a mother, especially the older group for whom this had important intergenerational consequences.

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to

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